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I dunno, RPing parents sounds pretty fun. At the least, the Dragonshy arc showed us Fluttershy can channel parental wrath and shame well enough... Though I doubt she has Applejack's confidence to temporarily play an NPC.

I buckin' *LOVE* roleplaying parents. Family members in general really. It's like, fun to take one small aspect of the PC's character and put it in the parent or relative so that it has this hint of where the PC got so-and-so genes for doing that.

Like, one time I was RPing a PC's dad and the PC was this adventurous ladies' man type of hero. So the dad was a quieter laid-back investor who traveled a lot. But he had this thing for being a ladies man too, a bit more suave than the PC though, so he was stealing his son's thunder. XD

Embarrassing relatives can be fun for everyone. One PC (a half sorcerer/rogue type) had an uncle was was 100% wizard. I played it up like Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures. Not only embarrassing the PC for their lack of arcane knowledge (and not taking wizarding levels), but poking fun at the other PCs for their poor choices in their lives.

Eventually the players were making Reflex saves not to get slapped on the head by Uncle and they dared never contradict his theories. We all had fun there. XD

"Hold up, your uncle doesn't know anything about riding a horse, but he can cast Prismatic Spray through a Scry spell?!"

Can't say I've ever roleplayed parents before. Though if I ever get that one Pathfinder game back off the ground, I'll certainly have an opportunity. One player plays a character with an explicitly normal and in no way tragic family life. The player made a point of emphasizing this. Mind you, the character is a human adopted by catfolk, but still, entirely normal.

Man, the last time I RPed my character's parents, I successfully convinced the rest of the party that I was crazy. And my character's father gave each party member the "rules for dating my daughter" Speech. Despite my character being male. Catching my father at the tail end of the last one, my bard said, "Father, I am a man!" His father backhanded him and said, "We wanted a girl, and you'll be a girl, or so help me, I'll get the dogs again!

"No! I'm a girl! I'm a good girl! I promise! Just don't get the dogs!"

And that was the last time I was allowed to play my own character's parents. (Also, there might have been a small child present to witness me roleplaying the exchange.)

I kind of rped one of my char own twin sister during a pathfinder campain.

Well, more like I was a rogue with a bit of paranoia, so whenever someone, like another player, came to me asking me by name, I'd cautiously pretend to be my sister. And when they said "but we need her for stuff", I'd then reply that no problem, I'm going to call her, then walk upstairs to a room, exit the inn by the window, climbs down to the street, then entered once again by the door, claiming that my sis told me I was needed there, without even a pause. And I would stick no matter what that yes, I do have a twin sister and nope, I wouldn't play such obvious trick, all with quite some confidence. And a bluff score that was so high that they would just drop the topic and call me a crazy rogue.

I did this on a regular basis, to the point that it was a reccuring joke for the party. They would even enter the inn, see me at a table and call out "hey, we need your sis !" right away. Fun times.

Then, one day, we needed to go to my place and as we entered the room, the DM does the description and says "and you see, sitting in a chair, another elf that look exactly the same than Luna's char..."

The whole party went crazy on that one. XD

Well, this was the first time they met my char's sis, so I was pretending to be her, but never lied when I said that I had a twin. :p

In the D&D game me and my old group used to play, our party leader, a Paladin of Loki, was brought to a one Loki's temples by his mother as a baby. We later found out that his father was not only a pirate, but also quite possibly Loki's most favored follower.

Roleplaying parents ...
I have an unhealthy fixation on making sure my character still has family alive/caring about them, so there's always at least one that crops up in the campaign.
My DM, no matter what I've described them to be like, gives them a Baltimore accent and makes them treat me like a little kid.
This is why my latest character is an exile.

I once played an orphan Paladin. After some adventuring together my party was on its way to the capital city, which happened to be where he grew up. Another player was so intense in worldbuilding that his character asked mine all about his childhood: life in an orphanage, who raised him, how he became a Paladin, etc. The trip to the town took 2 hours in real time just because the conversation never seemed to end.

So what does the DM do when we get there? Sends us straight to the orphanage on a story arc just so he can roleplay the 26 new characters I invented on the way over. Their names, personalities, everything was spot on with my descriptions. I didn't even notice the DM taking notes about them first.

TL;DR The DM will roleplay your "parents" even if you are an orphan; especially if you lay the groundwork for him.

Having a child that just doesn't follow either of the parent's usual paths is normal. Sorta the 'Black Sheep' thing. In my family, my borther took a technical careeer path (I.T.) while my two sisters and I are more artistic-oriented (animation, graphic design, and music). :)

Shining Armor is a gaming geek, who played a Paladin in 'Ogres and Obliettes' in his parents' basement with his high school friends.

Sometimes, he and Twilight would go out into the forest and pretend to hunt the monsters out of the monster manual, many of which actually exist because MLP but they were looking in the city park that wasn't monster infested so it was make-believe.

Admittedly, that would be more fun. Time will tell...
Or, you know, not. If every DM had a penny for every party that failed to ID a behind-the-scenes NPC... Wizards of the Coast would sell a lot more sourcebooks.

According to show lore,Shining Armour followed in his uncle's footsteps when joining the military.
It was mentioned if you listen carefully to the conversation between him and Not Cadence when Twilight was eavesdroping on them in Canterlot Wedding.

Playing Kingmaker AP a while back, and our tiefling ninja (Noapte) apparently decided that what our duchy needed was brothels in every city we built.

Well, Noapte's mom showed up, and at first she was just asking him if he learned patience yet. (Apparently he had run away from home when he was a teenager, to go "see the world" but only was away two days.)

She got introduced to the other characters, and shown what they were doing with the duchy. She immediately suspected him of being behind the preponderance of brothels in the land, and Serenity, being lawful good, confirmed this for her. Solomon got him in a bit of trouble with her as well, pointing out that he had lacked patience at least once, when he claimed to have gotten drunk and that resulted in his attempt to usurp Solomon job as Spymaster. The getting drunk part was a bald faced lie as well, and Solomon knew it, but has so far decided not to call him on it.

She asked Noapte if he had considered what the people who worked in the brothels had to go through, as well as their families. He spouted a bald-faced lie about having considered them being able to provide for their families, but with his abysmal (no pun intended) charisma, she easily saw through that.

So now she's staying on in the duchy, teaching at the academy in Olegton, and probably keeping an eye on her errant son.

I played a lawful good - and usually female - paladin, most of the time, so I spent a lot of time out-of-character justifying why my character was unaware of everyone else's In-character actions, usually by having myself be somewhere else.

Bearing in mind, however, that the other players were not so much managing as WORKING IN said houses of ill repute, so they weren't actually doing anything that was really evil, but there are some things I have no desire to hear role-played.

...I really hope you don't feel like you're obligated to provide this content, Specter. In my experience, it's never a good thing when people try to force themselves to become minor celebrities in the comments section through regularized, unrelated content. If it happens at all, it should happen naturally.

Firstly, Joural, I can't even force myself to shout or argue with anyone (which is annoying for me).

Secondly, Newbie, I don't feel obligated at all actually, I just am bored most of the day from lack of new experiences and activities. The only two frequently traveled areas on the internet I go to is here, and YouTube, since these two sites ever include a timely manner of new content that actually makes me smile or laugh. Plus I enjoy human interaction, which I can only find here. (On a side note, I love learning, and I find a lot of knowledge here by other commenters.)

The Round Stable forums, for pony chat;
rpg.net's Other Media, for general talking about media;
4chan's /tg/, for occasional awesomeness;
Spacebattles and its mutant offshoot, Sufficient Velocity for quest threads and crossover fanfic.

Forget NPC parents. I play parents. Especially with caster classes and long lived races, its not unrealistic for a professional. My dwarf rogue had five, daughters, (I had just seen Fiddler on the roof) during creation, which was helpful when it came to sense motive checks against cunning females. He'd write and send home money regularly and had the party wipe out a wizard's guild that was bullying his youngest daughter.

During the DM's time travel (hate time travel) the five more grown up girls managed to fight well in the "get the item to get us back to the past to save the future" battle, he was so proud.

Tell Us a tale about how your ST/DM/GM/ETC introduced your character to their family that they should have already known and how it went horribly awry...

For me:
My first ever D&D character was an Elf with a massive family (literally thousands of siblings) and I was last in the line for the throne... so I was 9 and not exactly paying 100% attention to the DM expositioning all this info at me (I was painting my miniature*)....

So many adventures down the road, I still didn't know what my characters 'mission' was (or that I even had a mission) and finally the party confronts the main villain of the campaign and the DM reveals that "He is the one who murdered all your siblings! Now you can kill him and avenge your family and claim your place in the succession!"

I said, "What? I have siblings? Had siblings? Errr, succession what"

The look on the DM's face was totally worth being made fun of for the next few months in game.

Also I learned to a) never ignore plot dumps and b) always write my own family's backstory.

* Painting figs is what got me into roleplaying initially and has been my passion ever since.

Roleplaying someone's parent(s) is easy. Try the other way around and roleplay someone's child or descendant and see how long it takes until a player regards said NPC as a mini-me or tries to turn him/her into a mini-me...

"Disgustingly normal"? What's wrong with normal. In fact, since I do detail my characters' backgrounds I have a tendency to make my parents and siblings normal. They're farmers who are proud of my rising from humble origins to become a national hero. They're well off merchants who want me to settle down and marry a wealthy suitor instead of "galvan ting bout shamefully". They're the accountant with the wife and three kids who asks how school was that day, unaware of your involvement in a magical sadow war. I like normal. It makes things interesting.

Sophie: Charlie, the messenger guy, you know, the one with the five kids?
Parker: Gay?
Sophie: Bulimic. Trevor, the frat boy, however... yeah. Super gay.
Parker: What about Peggy?
Sophie: Actually, Peggy is disgustingly normal. But the rest of them...

The DM is really going out of her way to emphasize how normal these ponies are. I can't help but feel like that "really normal job" is a front for something. It will probably never be important, but I'm guessing the DM has about 20 pages of notes on it.

Ah, family NPCs. A tool both incredibly useful for the player character but also a potent DM weapon. AoH players may remember how my attempts to make the Ward family an influential faction in Canterlot ended up having the Father killed and the entire family turned into demons. In the middle of the city.

Good heavens. Where might one read a record of the test group's adventures? Everything I hear about them seems to involve somepony turning into a monster of some sort. Ward's family to demons, Heat Wave to a psycho, Soaring Song to a memetic sex god...

I've done all of my tabletop RPG'ing on Roll20.net and either Skype or the Google Hangouts plugin. It also has a "Looking for Group" feature that's pretty reasonable. If you can't play IRL, it's definitely not too bad.

Once, I and another friend were sitting in on a session of Iron Kingdoms RPG. The GM always has eight-bazillion NPCs, so he justs hands out roles with little bits of motivation for anyone that happens to be around that isn't a PC (or is a PC but their character isn't around.)

One of the characters was visiting his parents. This resulted to me spending an hour of my life pretending to be married to one of my friends. We are both straight men. Naturally, this was a ridiculously entertaining hour and a good time was had by all. Best quote of the evening by far though:

Mom: "[Son], you know MAGIC?"
Son: "Uh... hehe yeah."
Mom: "SO WHY DO I STILL LIVE IN A SWAMP!?"

Parents are one of the most important things to RP for me. The character had to come from somewhere, right? Biologically, i mean. It can even be something as simple as disowned/dead/adopted/etc, but I always make an effort to explain why that happened. Most of the time, it's a simple "couldn't afford to keep you" but it's something.